1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a photocurable ink composition for ink jet recording, an ink jet recording method using the same, and a recorded material.
2. Related Art
Heretofore, there has been a screen printing method using an ink containing a brightening material as a technique for imparting brightness to a base material. However, in order to represent patterns, figures, characters, and the like by screen printing, it has been required to prepare plates corresponding to the number of required patterns and the like, resulting in the necessity of a large number of printing processes.
Then, as one of the techniques for more simply imparting brightness to a base material, a technique for recoding images having brightness by charging an ink composition containing a bright pigment in an ink jet printer, and then ejecting the ink composition to a base material has been proposed (e.g., Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2005-36079). Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2005-36079 discloses that scaly metal pigments, glass flake pigments, mica pigments, cholesteric liquid crystal polymer pigments, and the like can be used as the bright pigment.
However, the cholesteric liquid crystal polymer which is one kind of the bright pigments usually has a thickness of about 5 μm in order to demonstrate brightness utilizing the selective reflectivity of light. Therefore, when images are recorded using an aqueous ink composition containing water and a water-based binder as the main ingredients as disclosed in Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2005-36079, the moisture in the aqueous ink composition volatilizes, and thus the cholesteric liquid crystal polymer is exposed to the surface of a recording medium, which has caused a problem in that the scratch resistance of images is very poor.